1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to natural language understanding and, more particularly, to a system and method for automatic generation of a natural language understanding model.
2. Introduction
Dialog applications are often used to automate the process of receiving and responding to customer inquiries. Dialog applications use a combination of voice recognition, language understanding, and text to speech systems to appropriately respond to speech input received from a user or a customer. Billing inquiries, information queries, customer complaints, and general questions are examples of the speech input that is received by dialog applications. The response of the dialog application to a particular speech input depends on the logic of the dialog application.
The development of a successful dialog application, however, is a time consuming process and requires a significant amount of manual labor because of the nature of the tasks being performed. One of the tasks performed in the development of a dialog application is the generation of a natural language understanding (NLU) model. Conventionally, the generation of a NLU model is based on manually labeled utterances, the result of a time-consuming and labor-intensive process. What is needed therefore is a mechanism that enables a reduction in the time to generate an NLU model.